Char Miller

The Yale School of the Environment and the Society of American Foresters were founded in 1900; the U.S. Forest Service emerged five years later. There are origin stories for each but taken together they mark the rapid institutionalization of what their founders—who were deeply involved in all three organizations—described as “scientific forestry.”  The first word may be more important than the second, for the turn of the last century was when expertise, and the educational credentials that signaled one’s knowledge, were reinforced through membership in the relevant professional society. This process worked in two directions: it created an inside group (those who could be called foresters) and an outside group (those who could not lay claim to that nomenclature). Nothing is ever so simple, and this talk will address the tangled process of including and excluding that has its own history within the broader conservation movement.

Speaker Biography

Char Miller – W.M. Keck Professor of Environmental Analysis and History, Pomona College

Char Miller is the W.M. Keck Professor of Environmental Analysis and History at Pomona College in Claremont, California. His most recent books include Burn Scars (2024), Natural Consequences (2022), and West Side Rising (2021). He has written extensively about the U.S. Forest Service and other federal land-management agencies, as well as the Society of American Foresters, and is the author of Gifford Pinchot and the Making of Modern Environmentalism (2001); forthcoming is a co-authored history of YSE.

Recommended Reading:

Miller, C. (2025). Origin Stories. In Our Forests, Our Future: Honoring the Past, Engaging the Present, and Leading to the Future (pp. 9–21), Society of American Foresters.